by Martin Dansky

Created on: November 01, 2008   Last Updated: November 10, 2008

Thoughts of liberalism can be traced back to Plato's republic and the social set-up he suggested with men and women working for the common good of a the city-state, the pre-cursor of the modern country. They should be owing to that political entity and keep up its standards at their expense. Today we live in expanded city-states called nations and are still owing to a central hierarchy that is supposed to represent us. The state was meant to be the ideal personification of the family unit according to the ancient Greeks that followed his political recipe, and even today the way politicians relate to the public through authority is much the way that parents relate to their offspring. And we are geared towards a permanent state of subservience in the manner first prescribed by this ancient Greek philosopher although most of us think that slavery is abolished and are lives are freely determined.

If one jumps from the age of Socrates and Plato, the idea how liberalism is thought of today is seemingly different from how it was seen then. That is how political thought should be; we should keep up to date with the times including the use of terms. But in actuality there are some striking similarities in the socio-political meanderings of the Republic to the discourse our politicians give us today and that is to live life in liberty, we need to contribute for the greater good of the community which in turn offers services and products to us. Our ideal to amass importance and wealth under liberal auspices was also mirrored in ancient Greek times.

I remember how it was taught in an initial History class as a term that developed through the political thinking of the Whips in England. Here was a party, which challenged the norms of the crown to make the country more competitive in the market place and more accountable for its prosperity. There wasn't the attitude that its policies were flagrant or wasteful as one can imagine is happening south of the border in North America but there were concerns about their inability to grasp modernity and that could have blamed on any political person of the time regardless of their political leaning. Their control of the press is a good example of that political ineptness in the early 1800s at the time of the onset of the industrial revolution.

In the mid eighteen hundreds liberal thought was behind the social upheaval in Europe and strikes that were staged in order to create rights for the working class. It was this, which laid the basis

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